Posted
by
Soulskillon Tuesday November 02, 2010 @12:02AM
from the not-for-long dept.

jcl-xen0n writes "Apparently, some Chinese Kindle owners have discovered that they are able to access banned sites such as Twitter and Facebook without a problem. The article speculates that Amazon may be operating a local equivalent to Amazon Whispernet with a Chinese 3G provider. Professor Lawrence Yeung Kwan, of the University of Hong Kong's electrical and electronic engineering department, told the paper that mainland internet patrols might have overlooked the gadget (perhaps because they consider it solely a tool to purchase books). How long before Kindle traffic is locked down?"

I'd guess it won't be long. Is there any reason that people needed to publish this information? Is this stuff that people "must know" - to the point where it's worth getting it shut down? This seems pretty dumb to me.

The "Soviet Russia" is a throwaway - of course! I do like the general resonance with the notion that the Kindle, in a very real and significant way DOES read "you".

The tracking/advertising/selling model of Amazon is a borderline-insidious intrusion into privacy. The data is collected, presumably forever, and when combined with some interpretations of the Federal wiretapping laws, may someday stand as witness against you.

Here's a Wired article [wired.com] talking about the mistake. That said, suggesting that a government with an (apparently) moderately effective web filter "isn't too web savy" on the basis of a newspaper's screw up 8 years ago might be taking things a little far.

The fact that they aren't familiar with English language satire doesn't say much about their web savvy. I'm sure their comprehension of Chinese language websites is good enough to pick up on this news..

I guess that by the standards of openness and freedom set by the Chinese government, The Kindle looks relatively open and free from restriction. I guess there had to be something which fit that criterion:D

Never mistake an employee doing the old copy-and-paste with incompetence. In addition, Chinese have difficulty understanding sarcasm as a cultural issue. Go ahead and laugh at their lack of "savy" (sic) though. I'm sure the racism would be approved.

Do you really think there's nobody reading the web in China? Think twice. Few DAYS after the news about Opera Mini having the same "issue" being posted on slashdot, its proxy has been blocked, and Opera had to make a new version taking the Great Firewall of China into account. Would you mind giving your source that proves the government is that stupid, as is asking the person just right next to my post?

What planet are you living on? The Chinese government understands the web, its power and potential, better than any other entity in the world. They also understand how to control it.

Whatever fubs the PR department engage in, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology is Orwellian in its efficiency, and you can expect this hole to be plugged by the end of the week at the latest.

I'm not so sure how secure Tor would be against a state government large and powerful enough to monitor large portions of the Internet at once. Its real-time nature leaves it open to timing attacks among other things like compromised (primarily exit) nodes.

Facebook, most of wikipedia, and select parts of certain high profile news sites are the ones that get blocked. Slashdot, (at least when I was there) is certainly not consequential enough to bother blocking. FYI.

You, and quite a few other people, seem to think that only/. is publicizing this. Exactly how often does/. post exclusives or act in any way other than as a news aggregation website?

Also, imagine if only 50 people knew about this. It spread slowly through word of mouth and *eventually* the government shuts it down after, I dunno, 50,000 people learn about it and use it for 3-4 months. They complain, but what can they do? Other than go to jail for dissension.

This is definitely one of those situations where reporting is irresponsible. It is a certainty that the Kindle users in China will suffer or Amazon.com will suffer or both by putting this news out in this way.

It would have been better to collect the facts about the story and wait until the actual or eventual closing of that hole before reporting on it. There would still be a story and it wouldn't be a direct contributor to the problem which this story is actually about. I think whoever put that out shoul

Some holes aren't to be closed. Foreign simcards roaming to an uncensored Internet is not a new thing. Neither are VPN services. With the exception of some politically funded organizations who offered these services for free, these routes have _never_ been blocked. (I've been using them in China since 1997.)

The idea of censorship is not to restrict information from everybody. It's to prevent the masses from rebelling against the government. Those are two very different objectives.

The UK and many European countries have their own national firewalls too, built on very similar technology - they allow the managing organisations to not only block any website they want, but to even return a false 404 message to make it appear to be a technical problem rather than deliberate filtering. The excuse for this is, of course, that it's the only way to block child porn. Naturally, there is no accountability at all, because the list of blocked addresses contains child porn sites and thus may never

Not the british system - our Cleanfeed works by intercepting traffic to specified IP addresses, then redirecting it through a transparent proxy that does URL-level filtering. There's no way around it except by proxying through a computer outside of the country.

It's almost too bad this information has been released. On the plus side there could be many people that could grab some information, now that it's public, before it gets blocked. On the other hand, if they don't already know about this workaround they might not ever find out since the normal access to the internet is censored.

It's almost too bad this information has been released. On the plus side there could be many people that could grab some information, now that it's public, before it gets blocked. On the other hand, if they don't already know about this workaround they might not ever find out since the normal access to the internet is censored.

Censorship is the least of their problems. Information that is blocked because it is censored can also have attempts to access it logged. That's more than feasible with such a powerful state. Then those who attempt to access it can be located, interrogated, "re-educated", "disappeared", etc. A message stating "this has been blocked" or an artificial error accessing a perfectly functional site is pretty damned tame by comparison to what could happen.

Well that depends on how much popular Slashdot is among Chinese officials, but not very long I suppose. Maybe a new saying will get popularized there: They were slashdotted before they could enjoy their freedom

and a URL like Kindle-Allowing-Chinese-Unfettered-Access-To-Web is bound to catch someone's attention

I am eager to see their translation of "unfettered". Maybe they'll just think it means "not for feet" or something, and that the kindle just lets people use the web while laying on a sofa. That should be okay with them, right?

Chinese Government: If you want to do business in our country, you need to prevent people from accessing certain websites on their Kindles
Amazon: Oh, yes, that is already a feature, we just have not used it yet. Are there any books that we should delete from Kindles in China?

Well, let's see. The United States does business with Saudi Arabia, despite the abysmal human rights record of that country. The United States has installed several cruel dictators in South America, to help protect corporate interests there. The list of cruel, tyrannical governments that the United States has provided direct aid to or has kept open trade with is long. Why should China be any different, I wonder? What interest does the USA have in free speech or free press, or dismantling firewalls?

i find it hilarious that slashdot documents all these major breaches of the firewall, and subsequent "ha ha china has a stupid oppressive government, praise capitalism" type comments, but is not blocked by the firewall itself.

It already does. It's called the DMCA. Why firewall something, which requires enormous support and resources amongst the ISPs, when you can leverage bullshit copyright laws and corrupt, vile, organizations like the RIAA and simply delude the companies hosting objectionable content without due process?

Yes a lot of schools teach some English, but aside from the middle-to-upper class youth in the big cities, nobody will actually use it. When was the last time you Googled in French to find out what the french media write about your own country? It's just not something you do that quickly. And if you did, how far did 2 years of french class really get you when it comes to reading political articles?

Chinese material simply spreads much, much faster and hence gets most of the censors attention.

I regret to say that your understanding is wrong. China blocks a lot more than only content in Chinese.

By the way, the current situation is that when you do some "politically incorrect" queries on Google, you got flagged to have the full of Google HK blocked all together. Otherwise, you can search whatever you want, since Google HK isn't blocked at all (until you search for the wrong things). No need to tell here what's wrong to search, you guys all know and it has been discussed many times.

Am I wrong about English language Google searches not being blocked in China? I didn't mean to say that they don't block any English language content, just that it isn't a high priority and much of it does remain unfiltered.

Search google (.cn.hk or otherwise) through a Chinese ISP and you will get server timeouts with forbidden phrases like "tiananmen 4.6". If you keep doing it the entire domain is blocked for you for 10 to 15 minutes. Confirmed it myself in July of this year.

The purpose of China's Golden Shield (what you are incorrectly calling a firewall) is not to keep Chinese people in. It is to keep foreigners OUT. Just wait for the first big net-war. China will shut the world off and go on its merry way. Its citizens will be able to conduct banking, buy from taobao, email each other, etc. Export business will be affected, true, but that is becoming less and less important as China develops its internal markets. The golden days of exporting are over, finished, done.

Please consider uploading some information about Cisco's involvement to WikiLeaks (or any other site that you trust to preserve your anonymity).

Pressuring American companies to end their involvement in internet censorship would be more effective in the long term than a 40ft shipping container full of Kindles, and would help to undermine some of the "USA good, China evil" hypocrisy surrounding this issue.

The broad point is a valid one, that a large part of the purpose of the great firewall is keeping the rest-of-world from being able to see what's going on IN china, blocking their citizens uploading pictures to sites like twitpic prevents the rest-of-world from seeing mobile phone photos of things that make the chinese gov't look bad, for example

It's a catch 22. How else are people going to learn about it if nobody talks about it and if people talk about it it's gonna get yanked.
Wow. I read that sentence and realized how depressingly accurately it describes truth in American politics.

am glad this professor was so kind as to point out this loophole to the communist rulers. Had he not mentioned the *loophole*, it may have been months, years, or even DECADES before communications of the unfiltered kind could've been shutdown with the outside world!

Was just in China last week. Own a CDMA Droid 1, which was on international roaming (1x speed). I noticed I could access facebook, so I tried a few other things. Long story short, I was able to access the wikipedia article on Tienamen square while IN tienamen square. Well, briefly then I put the phone away and got out of sight.

This was meant to be, as with the advent and the use of better technology and gadgets the security or the arrangements needs to be beefed up to have some good benefits or stop them from accessing the sites banned in China for the people there. The technology has been moving ahead at such a rate that by the time the people get accustomed and used to one the new one on the block might have already been waiting for them.
designer girls shoes [alexandalexa.com]

This has nothing to do with the kindle and everything with foreign simcards.

Foreign simcards have always been able to access the uncensored Internet in China, simply due to how roaming works. (Likewise a Chinese simcard in a western country will still find the Internet in it's censored form.) European pre-paid simcards have been traded in China for years now.

Of course an article about a 'belgian simcard' isn't nearly as internesting as the Kindle or i-Anything, but this is non-news nontheless.

Anyone who cares about free access to the Internet has some method around the Great Firewall. VPN services are even advertised quite freely in China for foreigners over there (maybe because the officials can't read them). Anyways, despite what many westerners would expect, the Chinese themselves often support the government's general ability to block access to websites. Much like in America, these things are framed as actions taken for the good of the nation, and just like the Americans, the majority will accept that. I had a discussion about this when I was in China, and I was the only one who disagreed with the firewall. Nobody really seemed to miss anything, and they asked me which sites are blocked. I rattled off a few like YouTube and Blogger, but they hadn't heard of them. For video sites, they use Youku and Tudou. For blogs and the like, QQ's services are popular. Perhaps the only exception to any of this is that some younger people like to get around the firewall so they can use Facebook as well (FB is blocked in China), but the Chinese have their own social networking site that is more popular there (RenRen). China is a whole different animal.

I made the same experience while living in China. Most people don't care about not being able to read about Tienanmen or Falungong or what ever. They DO get pissed if things get blocked they like like Youtube or Facebook, but generally "it's good for the nation to protect Chinese from biased western influence".

Fun fact: I'm from Germany and nobody ever complained here not being able to google for right-wing websites like Stormfront*, etc and many people do support the upcoming child-porn firewall which is n

I wonder how much of this was a concern for your motives in questioning them, Chinese outside of China certainly have a problem with words they post on blogs being changed as they post them. I'd guess its very similar inside, but the desire to express their plans for a new revolution to people they haven't really met before will be somewhat less.

So that raises another question, maybe the reasons for blocking are protectionist rather than censorist? They don't mind the idea of "Facebook" but want their own running instead (because its Chinese, but also because it's probably easier to control). Maybe some of both.

Thanks to OP, not long. I really don't see the need to publicise underground information like this given they know it will lead to it being shutdown. OP is basically daring the Chinese authorities to do just that. And so I award him the Jeff Young Award for Stupidity on Slashdot.

Yes; Demonstrating Stupidity ahead of his time, jryoung@gmail.com posted this story telling all any sundry where you could get free textbooks on the net. Within days of his post

This should have remained an unknown unknown by the world and the Chinese authorities. Now it's become a known known for them. Or something like that. My head hurts. Good bye, free access through Kindle. We barely knew ye.

What this says to me is that Amazon is routing/tunneling the traffic from the web browser on the Kindle through their servers. If the browser on the Kindle (WiFi/3G) were to access banned sites directly, they'd be hitting the Chinese content firewall.

All Kindle browser traffic does go through an Amazon proxy and always has. Going to whatismyip.com from my Kindle returned 8.18.145.128 which is an Amazon proxy server (as opposed to the Sprint address I would get if I went to the same address using a Sprint Overdrive which uses the same 3G network). They do this for a number of reasons, including giving them the ability to control how much data the Kindle devices can consume (they can block content types and sites; for example, you cannot download PDF fi

I returned to Shanghai from the US and Tokyo recently and was shocked to discover that not only did the 3G China networks bypass the great firewall, but the kindle 3G access fired up easily in all three countries with absolutely no cost to me! . . . FREE 3G . . . Worldwide . . . as far as I can tell. The kindle has already paid for itself. w00t!

A huge problem with the Kindle in China is that it does not handle Unicode. There are no Unicode fonts on the device. And all of the font hacks have been disabled with the latest software.

So, as long as they are reading in English the Kindle is fine. Non-English? Well, that language they speak in the UK is probably OK. Italian probably works mostly. Maybe French. But Cyrillic is a no-go. As is Japanese and Chinese.